Static
by snags
Summary: Edgeworth's first loss in court means a nasty visit from Von Karma. Rated M for slight violence and Von Karma's choice of words.


October 10, 9:05 PM

Von Karma slammed his protégé's office door so hard that the windows rattled.

Brief though it was, the sound of their shuddering in their frames bypassed the younger attorney's logical brain and sent adrenalin spikes through his joints.

_That was __**deliberate**__. You theatrical… _Anger, Edgeworth was well aware, was a more useful reaction than panic, but chill calm was better than either, so he tried to display nothing but a level gaze. Still, he hadn't quite been able to loosen his white-knuckled grip on the edge of his desk, and his mentor glanced down and twitched his mouth in contempt.

"I hope you're ashamed of yourself."

Edgeworth's first loss in court had actually been several weeks prior, but the confrontation he'd sat in his office expecting on the night of Maya Fey's Not Guilty verdict, until four in the morning, simply had not happened. Nor did it come the day after, though he'd sat up until four in the morning again. Nor the day after that.

On the bleary and blinding morning of the fourth day, he'd had two realizations in quick succession: one, that he would never call the man himself. And two, that the delay didn't mean that the conversation wasn't going to happen. He'd spent the intervening time walking around with knowledge of pain to come lodged like a blood clot in his lung.

"Infant. You've barely been a lawyer for ten minutes. You aren't a Goliath brought down by God's favorite. You are, as the little punks say, a punk." Von Karma wasn't raising his voice an iota. He didn't need to scream; he knew sounding decisive was worse.

The old man, standing with his back to Miles and facing one of the bookshelves, casually backhanded the contents of the second shelf from the top to the floor. A framed photograph of a university building landed with a flat crack. Then a resonant crunch as the frame with Franziska's picture landed partially on top of that. Most of the eight neatly matched books thudded down unharmed, but one wound up fanned out like a peacock's tail, the spine broken.

"You knew very well the conditions under which I accepted you into my house. And yet you lost. I never lose."

He turned around and covered the distance to the far side of the desk in two steps.

"You should have been able to smash that community-college cheap suit like a grasshopper. You should have ripped right through him on your way to that girl. So I want you to tell me, in your own words, what is wrong with you?"

Hands clasped below his belt buckle. Waiting. Courteously.

Miles felt as though he was jumping off a cliff, but he had mastered speaking with confidence. "The actual question is what was wrong with the case. The girl was innocent, as i-"

A roar like something out of Melville. "NOBODY IS INNOCENT!"

"That girl was innocent of that crime."

"Only a coward would tell himself that, boy. Swinging her was your responsibility."

Miles mentally receded from the room, considering. Losing had been embarrassing, an embarrassment and a shock. But putting that personal consternation temporarily aside, did he mind that Maya Fey had been freed?

Well.

Redd White had been taken into custody. The case had been solved.

No. Maya Fey, he didn't mind.

With that realization, the frustrated knot in his own chest loosened a little. But this was no moment, came his next thought, to be feeling better.

"I don't...enjoy losing, now that I've experienced it. Wright can expect to be startled in the rematch. I'll get him next time, when the police haven't botched the job and put the wrong person in the dock."

Von Karma quavered like someone trying not to laugh, and then one black-clad arm streaked forward. Miles was jerked forwards against the edge of his desk as the old man's strong yellow fingers grabbed the folds of his cravat and tangled themselves there. As the senior lawyer spoke, he twisted the fabric a little tighter with each word, and the already red room darkened to maroon and started to sparkle around the edges.

"**Innocent**. Wrong with the **case**. The wrong **person**. Tell me, Miles, tell me, you little parasite, you little pretense. When were you given permission to **care**?"

He eased his grip just a little, but jerked Edgeworth's head up so that their eyes met.

"Allow me to make myself clear. You owed me that girl the way you owe me everyone who stands in the dock in front of your pretty, pretty suits and your pretty-" he began twisting the cravat again- "pretty, grey eyes."

He had expected to be chastised. To be more honest, he had expected to be driven to tears. But he hadn't even considered the ghoulish direction this had taken. This wasn't anything like professional discipline or even a parental dressing-down. This was distorted. Amiss.

"I fished you out of the trash, you fatherless remnant. You owe me everything. You owed me those little sandals, dancing on the air."

He would have no choice but to think about this more later. He would think about this in complete sentences when he could breathe. But while he was trying to construct some kind of look that was icy and fierce and invulnerable, he felt mostly sick and alarmed. And his mentor, his erstwhile father, watched his irises flicker and knew that.

"You could have been a Don Juan with those eyes. You're not fighting me. You just look so **sad**. "

Edgeworth cursed himself. _When will I have the control that I need?_

"And that damned grey hair. Signs of damage that obvious must pull all those clever, sensitive ladies in like they were whippets in heat. But you're no lover of women, are you, boy?" Manfred finally let go, flaring his fingers out with a quick flash of disgust, the way a normal person might react to accidentally picking up a spider.

_No. I'm not. I'm also so far from having that kind of a relationship with anyone, ever, that you might as well be talking to the table._

"You're a faggot. As if you needed another mode of failure! And somehow you're still a lawyer. Do as I tell you and dye your damned hair. Make yourself less interesting to any sick boys who might want to bend you over a bathroom sink. Besides, people will wonder whether I didn't feed you."

Was this sort of thing supposed to make you physically tired? Edgeworth was already exhausted. He felt, for a moment, as though he didn't care what else the other man would say. At some point, this conversation would end. There were just a certain number of sounds to hear before then. A certain number of cars passing the building.

"Do you know, you remind me of someone I hanged."

And the illusion of being a rock in an ocean of sound was wrenched away.

"He managed a restaurant. I'd actually been there."

Von Karma hadn't said anything like this in years. But there had been a time, starting when Miles had been maybe twelve and lasting until maybe a year before he'd left for college, when examples of misbehavior that hadn't been quelled in one stroke had ultimately been met with comparisons between the boy and one of the criminals he'd personally doomed. It was a different person every time.

"His older boyfriend disappeared over the Easter weekend."

Miles realized that he had no idea whether Manfred had ever turned the same tactic on Franziska, and felt ashamed of himself for never asking. _I would have hated him if I had found out he had.  
_  
"No great loss. No evidence to speak of, for that matter. But this little ragdoll, he couldn't explain very well what he'd been doing both those days. He just stared up at the judge. He stared up at me! And he looked oh, so sad."

_For that matter. Von Karma, I think I hate you right now, either way._

"His pretty face was no help, of course. And of course it didn't last! He sobbed and screamed just like a frightened hausfrau in front of the gallows, and he turned as purple as any of them. Maybe more!

"It's a good thing you're on the right side of the law, Miles. Because, given what you showed the world today, you'd put on the same kind of display the day they hanged YOU."

He bent down.

"And since you never answered my question, I'll answer it for you. 'I, Miles Edgeworth, am a shame to my father.' "

_Which one do you mean? You wouldn't dare. You're right.  
_  
" 'I am a disgrace to my profession. I'm a faggot. And I'm a little boy dressed up in men's clothes.' "

Which was only, exactly, what he'd been telling himself already. The same phrases that would slide into his head when he shut his apartment door behind him at night, when he rinsed solitary plates in the sink, when he dry-swallowed his frequent aspirin in front of the medicine cabinet mirror. But at least there was something tacit about that, something that felt responsible. Like he was keeping an eye on his own flaws. There was not even that consolation to be had when it was the man who had raised him speaking out loud.

_This makes it so much harder to hope otherwise._

Stunned and mentally bruised, Miles watched Von Karma flip idly through the desk calendar that sat on a middle shelf. The yellow fingers reached the last page and then let them all drop. An almost avuncular note bloomed into the voice.

"There, now, I think that about covers it. Work hard, boy, and don't disappoint me again." He turned toward the door, to all appearances at brisk and ease with the world.

Edgeworth found his voice. "How is Franziska?"

"Smarter than you. She always was." And he closed the door behind him.

The young attorney looked, blank-faced, at the door for a few moments, and then moved automatically to the fallen contents of the shelf. He lined the books back up, and sighed over the damaged one. He carefully pulled the broken glass out of the picture frames and threw it away. The pictures were placed gently back where they had been. And then the numbness started to wear off, and there was nothing useful to say, and no one to say it to.

_He hates me._

_Well, you decided you hated him._

_He took me in, but now he hates me._

_Did he ever love you to begin with?_

_Of course not!_

_Who does?_

_Franziska. But she wouldn't sympathize right now._

_Your little sister loves you. That's good enough, isn't it? Who needs more?_

_I miss. My **dad**-_

_Oh, the one you shot?_

He crumpled over the arm of his desk chair with one of the bronchial barks that he'd learned to make as an adolescent boy who didn't want to be seen crying. One of his teachers had once sent a note home, suggesting that Miles be evaluated for asthma. Von Karma had just raised a disbelieving eyebrow at him.

_And do I need to point out that you're an egotist even when you're miserable? You're worrying about what your mentor thinks of you, in the face of what he apparently thinks of humanity._

If that's how much he likes people, he probably left Germany because Germany doesn't have the death penalty.

He stood up from the chair and sat down immediately on the floor next to it. There are only so many emotions that can share the upper reaches of thought, and the collection that his confrontation with his mentor had unearthed moved back and forth like the colors in some evil opal. Fear, disgust, shame; fury, resentment, guilt. And all of them tired.

He forced himself to get up, perfectly aware that if he didn't he'd spend the entire night in a ball at the foot of his desk. He hung up his jacket in the tiny closet by the door and noted with a single spark of relief that a clean suit and shirt still hung there in their dry cleaner's bags. He then removed his glossy black shoes (their twin thumps onto the floor startlingly loud in the practically empty building) and collapsed spiritlessly onto the couch, unfolding a blanket and pulling it up almost as far as his nose. It wouldn't be the first night he'd spent in the office.

As soon as he closed his eyes, though, he realized the kinds of dreams that would be waiting. _I had better give my limbic system some filler material. Tomorrow is still a work day._

He got back up long enough to flick open the cabinet that contained a tiny television set and to get the remote out of a drawer. Officially, it was there so he could review footage submitted as evidence and watch any breaking news broadcasts.

The first channel was showing some kind of game show. _Stupid._ The next, apparently, _South Pacific_. _No Rodgers and Hammerstein, for God's sake! _Then something in Spanish, which he was a good ways from fluent in. A few channels of screaming static snow. And then, to his utter shock, a pale, aging face with a strong chin, slicked-back hair, and a hugely nasty smile, aimed straight at the camera.

He dropped the remote, and his pulse galloped in his ears as he stared at the glowing face on the screen. It didn't really take more than a very long second for him to understand that the heavily made-up actor was no more than that, but for that moment it felt as if Manfred had burst back into the room through unnatural means.

And then a clunky, awkward suit of silver armor stomped into the frame and bonked the malevolent figure across the shoulders with the flat of a shiny fake sword.

Bonk was the only word for that noise. And the malevolent figure fell over, with a gurgling, angry, high-pitched shriek, still pointing one finger in the air.

Miles Edgeworth laughed harder than he'd probably laughed in fifteen years. He laughed until he coughed, laughed until tears ran into his shirt collar, and laughed until the lights in his office seemed three times brighter.

_What am I WATCHING? That was fantastic._

The episode of whatever this brilliant piece of television history even was ran for another ten minutes, until a vaguely martial synthesized tune began to play and the dashing pie-plate hero was silhouetted against the moon in a freeze-frame. An announcer said, FOR GREAT JUSTICE, to return next week for the continued adventures of the Steel Samurai.

As the credits went by, Miles gave the screen an incredulous grin, fueled by lingering endorphins.

_I can't understand how people say this rots your brain. Mine seems improved._

There was still so much wrong. Much more than he'd known about, the sober part of him recalled. And he understood that it wasn't the sort of thing he could ignore. But he felt something, finally, warm.

_Von Karma? This would be __**my**__ office. This is my territory, for what it's worth. This is my job. My casework. My clothing! My television! My hair! I work for the courts of the city of Los Angeles, and my place here is dependent on more than what you think of me._

The world looked a little better.


End file.
